Sea Ventures are a well-established name in the realm of UK boat sales, boat dealers and brokerage, based in the South Coast of England.
We co-operated with Sea Ventures over the course of the previous quarter to build a comprehensive eCommerce website that extracts boat listings straight from their external feed provider Boats.com.
Wireframe
The first phase of the build was the all-important wireframe stage. This is essentially a more advanced version of a sketch, and it’s how we determine the user interface, element placement and overall look and feel of the website.
Build
Now the fun part! We bring our wireframe to life.
Sea Ventures already had an established brand, so the intention wasn’t to take away from this, but to add to it with a much more user-friendly experience.
The focus point of Sea Ventures are their Brands, Ranges and Models, so we built a custom dropdown to link internally to their on-brand landing pages.
Integration
For Sea Ventures, synchronisation is an integral part of their business operations.
So we took to developing a custom integration between the website and Boats.com that automatically extracts all products from their Boats.com feed, with this data it:
- Creates new boats and imports associated images, description, price and additional information
- Updates existing boats and overwrites their information
- Sets custom price and currency for each boat depending boat location
- Generate a custom PDF file to print the listing, capturing the same exact information
- Utilises a bespoke search system by building queries containing custom meta data
- within each boat listing
The Result
The feedback we have received from the Sea Ventures team is nothing short of extremely positive.
Firstly, the new website hasn’t been built to just look good (although it does), it’s been built to function, provide a great user experience, and market to their target audience.
Secondly, the next and biggest pain point was the lack of control. We conducted training sessions to guide the Sea Ventures team through the custom processes of making alterations, page and post creation, management, and deletion.
Finally, a large part of the website is keeping the products up-to-date. We built our own custom integration to translate information from an external Boats.com feed and channel it directly into the website automatically.
We build our websites to empower our clients and arm them with the ability to make amendments and changes themselves. After all, it’s their website and they are free to use it as they please.
